The Stardust on his Skin
by Spazzcat-Katori
Summary: Everyone has soulmarks. Hourglasses that count down to your soulmates death. In all history, there's only ever been three known types of soulbonds. Red for romantic, blue for platonic, and black for mortal enemy. They're known, researched, and completely understood. Then Takashi Shirogane is born, with two reds, six blues, three blacks, and four timers filled with pure white sand.


Soulmate timers.

The delicate little hourglass patterns that march down people's bodies, counting down the lifespans of the people who are or will be important in their lives. Most of the time children don't give them any thought, relegating them to the background of their lives until they're entering their teens and begin to understand the implications, and only then will their timers begin to take center stage in their lives.

Takashi Shirogane is not most children. He's never had the luxury of being innocent to the nature of the timers, to what they mean for him and his future.

For as long as he can remember, everyone has been obsessed with his timers. His earliest memories feature a constant parade of doctors and specialists, poking and prodding and staring. With so much attention on them, he can't help but listen and learn and it doesn't take him long to understand why.

His two romantic timers are perfectly ordinary, red sands frozen in place until the moment he and his soulmates first speak to each other. So are his platonics, the neat little row of six blue hourglasses, one already trickling away the sands of his twin sister's life since they first touched in their cradle on the day they were born. The three black ones at least get a passing glance from most specialists. Mortal enemy timers are rare, and all of Human history's greatest heroes and villains have borne at least one. Someday his life will reach a crossroads and the path he chooses will activate one or more and lead him to a conflict at which he can only speculate. But even so, that's not what they're here to see. They're here to see the white ones.

In all of recorded history there's never been a white soulmate timer. And Shiro has four.

They sit frozen at the end of the row, after the black ones, stopping just short of his wrist. Everyone has theories about what they represent, what will activate them, why a new bond type seems to have emerged. Why the grains seem to sparkle against his skin like the distant pinpoints of stars. No one knows for sure. None of them have ever seen anything like this. All they can do is wait, and see what happens when and if another child with a white timer is born.

They wait for over five years. But it will be twenty-five before he truly understands.

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When Shiro is nine, the doctor appointment seems just another of many. Another pale-walled building, more forgettable men and women in white coats and suit jackets and making notes on tablets. He's used to just tuning them out at this point, answering their questions on automatic. They won't ask him anything he hasn't answered a thousand times before.

Except this time when his parents hustle him into the examination room, there's another family there, and that's something completely new. The mother eyes him apprehensively as she clutches her fretful toddler to her chest. The boy shifts, blue eyes eyeing the newcomers anxiously, and the movement exposes a flash of white on the left wrist and in an instant Shiro understands.

Taking a deep breath to gather himself, he pastes on a smile and takes the initiative. "Hey." He says softly, as gentle and reassuring as he can possibly be as he holds out his left hand in greeting toward the child. "My name's Shiro. What's yours?"

"Lance." Is the shy answer he gets as the boy takes his hand. Shiro can't help but glance at his arm as he shakes it. A double row, with one red, almost twenty blues, several already flowing, a pair of blacks just like his, and, sure enough, four delicate whites.

"Nice to meet you, Lance." There's a warmth blooming in his chest, a feeling of rightness and joy that he can't quite describe. Lance must feel it too, because the tension fades from him and Shiro is treated to a beaming, toothy smile that lights up the entire room.

The white timers on their arms don't move. But on each of them, a blue one does.

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After Lance and his family leave, Shiro overhears the doctors talking to his parents. There's a third child with white timers, apparently, a boy in Samoa just a few months older than Lance. Lance will be going to meet him next, and if something happens they'll arrange a meeting for Shiro, too. If not…

Shiro tunes them out and focuses on his timer instead. The second blue platonic is trickling slowly, the slow pace and full top half of a healthy young child. As long as he doesn't do anything stupid, Lance has a long life ahead of him.

He smiles. Hopefully the doctors will let him stay in touch as Lance grows up. If he can't have someone who's been there before to talk to about his timers himself, at least he can be that for his soulmate.

(They don't. But he never forgets that beaming smile.)

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Meeting other children with white timers doesn't seem to work, he learns (Lance and Hunk became fast friends, but their bond is also blue, not white), and the specialists are stumped. With no other ideas, they decide to let it happen on its own, however that may be. For the first time Shiro is allowed to be a normal child, to go to a normal school and make normal friends and live a life that doesn't revolve around his abnormal timers.

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A year later, a fourth child is born. A little girl, premature but a fighter.

Shiro learns about her on the scientific forum where timer experts discuss the latest research in the field. Looking at the still photo of her tiny, tiny arm, with its seven blues, two blacks, and four shiny whites, he finds himself thinking _just one more_.

He's not sure why he thinks it, though.

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Health class includes a section on timers. The different colours (the teacher never mentions white), what they mean, how they're activated and what affects the flow. For the first time Shiro learns about broken timers, what happens when a soulmate dies before you ever meet.

His hourglasses seem to itch under the soft cloth he wraps them with. The thought of his soulmates dying, of never knowing what the white sand on his arm means, scares him.

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He grows. He learns. He falls in love with the sky, then with the stars beyond.

(The white sand on his arm twinkles the same way, and he wonders if maybe he'll find answers up there.)

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"Is this room 276?"

"Sure is! You must be my roommate!"

The skin on the crook of his elbow suddenly feels hot and he yanks up his sleeve in surprise, barely aware that the young man across from him has done the same with a startled curse. Sure enough, when he tugs down the wrap, red sand is flowing from the top of the first hourglass to the bottom. Shiro stares at it for a moment, transfixed, then lifts his head to meet the delighted amber gaze of his soulmate.

The other boy beams and offers a hand-his left, the timers still exposed for Shiro to see, a dozen blues (two are flowing) and two reds, one just starting to move. "Matthew Holt."

Shiro smiles back and shakes it, not re-covering his red just yet. "Takashi Shirogane."

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Life at the Garrison is harder than anything he's experienced before, both academically and socially. American teens are wilder than those of Japan, entirely uninhibited, and Shiro finds himself fending off endless prodding and prying about his perpetually-covered arm. It takes a few uncomfortable months before he learns to bring up his blacks instead of his mysterious whites, enough stigma against their association with tyranny and crime existing that most people accept the excuse. Through it all, Matt is a rock of support and acceptance-teaching him the customs, helping whenever his English falters, and never once asking about his timers even after he accidentally sees them twice after a shower.

It takes Shiro two years to work up the courage to tell him, about the frozen white timers with their meaning and links unknown. How there are only three others like him in the world, and still no one knows why. He tells him about the endless doctor visits as a child, the way he's required to submit monthly check-ins to his family doctor and let them know anytime any of his timers changes.

"It's going to attract a lot of attention when they finally figure out what they're for." He says quietly. He's known that for a long time, and dreaded it ever since. "I'm sorry. I know you didn't exactly sign up for this when you got my for your soulmate."

"Hey. You've got nothing to apologize for." Matt's voice is firm his gaze steady, and pale fingers lace with his own. "As far as I'm concerned, whatever fate chose you for, it must be something special. And I'll be right there to love and support you the whole way. You _and_ your white timers."

Shiro's eyes burn as Matt kisses the inside of his forearm and he wonders, not for the first time, how he got so lucky.

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("Besides," Matt says later with a smug, cheeky grin, "my sister has them too. The fourth registered case. So it's not exactly new to me."

Shiro smacks him with a pillow, but his heart swells with love.)

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Keith tumbles into his life like a particularly recalcitrant hurricane, all sharp edges and raw talent and a love for the stars that burns as brightly as Shiro's own. He's wary, defensive, and the fact that their introductory handshake sets blue timers flowing on both their (covered) arms only seems to make things worse when all Shiro wants is to offer him the chance to fly. But Shiro keeps trying anyway-soulmate or not, Keith needs someone who cares, and he'll gladly be that person if Keith will only give him the chance.

It takes months of work, every inch of progress feeling like pulling teeth from a tiger, until suddenly, something somewhere gives and he realizes one day that Keith is asleep with his head on Shiro's shoulder, unguarded and vulnerable in a way that Shiro hadn't even realized he'd earned. The blue sand on his arm seems to warm on his skin, matching the feeling in his chest.

He knows he should wake Keith up to get back to studying for his test.

He doesn't.

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When the Kerberos mission is announced, Shiro's heart skips a beat. Humanity's farthest deep-space mission to date. He applies for the pilot selection program and throws himself into training with everything he has, preparing for the intensive battery of tests that will whittle down the contenders until there's only the best left. He drills the most difficult sims over and over, simulating a thousand different emergencies until he can react to anything in his sleep. He crams his head with physics, and engineering, and anything else he can think of that could be useful in a crisis. He works until he can't work anymore, and then he dreams of stars that flow past his body like glittering white sand.

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The selection tests are ten kinds of exhausting, and maybe that's why muscle memory fails him for the first time since he came to the Garrison and he leaves the showers with his left arm exposed. He doesn't even realize his mistake until he all but collides with Keith coming around a corner, putting up a hand to steady the teen, and violet eyes go wide, wide, wide.

He doesn't even get a word out, tongue-tied by surprise and dismay, before Keith is dragging him into his dorm room-roommate thankfully absent-and whatever he was going to say dies completely on his tongue as Keith shoves up his own left sleeve with a feverish, desperate haste. Bandages fall away, Keith's fingers clumsy in his speed, and Shiro's eyes are locked on the timers that come into view one by one by one.

One red, already flowing. Part of Shiro wonders when that happened, why Keith never mentioned it because he knows it wasn't moving on the day they first met. Eight blues, two already flowing (him and Matt, he knows), and one that's the faded grey of death. Two blacks, frozen still. And at the end-

Shiro's breath catches

-at the end, _four whites_.

"I thought I was the only one." Says Keith, his voice a trembling whisper.

"You're not." Shiro promises, pulling his little brother into his arms, his heart aching as he imagines how Keith must have felt with the unknown on his arms and no one he could trust to ask through all his years alone. "You're not. You never were."

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After Kerberos, he promises, he'll contact his family doctor and introduce Keith to Lance and Hunk and Pidge. There's five of them now-four others for the four white timers they each wear on their arms. Maybe if they all come together, they'll _know._

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The day he stands on the surface of Kerberos, the Milky Way a shining expanse over his head, is the best day of his life.

Until it isn't.

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His left arm burns as he stands beside Matt, part of a double row of terrified prisoners outside a set of doors that mutes a distant roar, and he pushes his sleeve up as unobtrusively as he can. It takes him a moment to realize what he sees, and when he does a wave of terror chills him to the bone. Matt's timer is running down, red sands rushing toward the bottom in a torrent that will have the top half empty in minutes. Whatever lies beyond that door spells certain death for the man he loves the most.

The doors swing open, spilling out the lights of an arena and the roar of a crowd and the shadow of a monster standing on the sands. Shiro takes it all in in an instant and throws himself forward in a desperate, hopeless gamble.

As the guards drag Matt away, his blood on Shiro's blade, he's rewarded by a tingle as red sand rushes upwards. But now it's just him and the giant and he knows, without question or doubt, that it's his own sand pouring downwards now in the marks on his soulmates' arms.

He sends a silent apology across the stars, to Matt, to Keith, to Lance, and Akira, for the faded grey timers they'll bear from now on, and to the soulmates he never met for the shattered glass they'll receive.

(Especially to the four who bear the white timers like his. What will happen when the stardust spills?)

He fights.

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(He survives. But he tries not to remember how.)

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He wakes to a dirty, cracking roof that he's never seen before, to the half-forgotten smells of sand and heat and open air. He wakes to scars and metal where skin should be and holes in his memories and to four anxious faces, one he doesn't know and two he thinks he should and one he thought he would never see again.

He hugs Keith to his chest and tries not to wonder whether he's dreaming or if he's dead.

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Shiro does his best to pull himself together like a jigsaw puzzle with half its pieces gone, while the others introduce themselves and fill in what they can. The three he doesn't know are Lance ( _that_ Lance, he's pretty sure), Hunk (he wonders, but now isn't the time to ask), and Pidge (and he starts at that name because that name and that face can't be any sort of coincidence). They tell him about the Garrison's lies and the timers that never ran out (and Pidge goes very quiet and their hand goes to cover their arm and if he wasn't sure before there's no doubt in him now) and how he came crashing back to Earth in a spaceship of alien design that he doesn't know the origin of any more than they do. Garrison quarantine, a hasty rescue (and he should probably be mad at Keith for his reckless driving if it wasn't to keep him safe), and the long hours since then that they spent waiting for him to wake up.

He laughs for the first time in what is probably ages he doesn't remember when Hunk says "platonic soulmates to the rescue!" and holds up his arm in explanation.

They're all blue soulmates for each other, it turns out, except for Lance and Keith who give each other awkward glances that make Shiro wonder if Lance is the mysterious red that he never told him about. And as he changes into the clothing Keith provides, he catches sight of his timers (two reds, one inactive and one still mercifully flowing slow, six blues, only one left to go, three blacks, not yet active, and those baffling, still-frozen whites), he wonders at the odds of those four, the four who are like him and who all share bonds with him and each other, being drawn together like this in this time and place.

He wonders about fate, and his arm itches as the sleeve covers it.

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Keith tells them about the energy that draws him into the desert, and it itches more.

They go.

And they find the Blue Lion.

(He's not sure what _Voltron_ means, but it seems to echo down inside of him like a shout in a void of stars, and the inside of his left wrist _burns._

From the look on the faces of the others, they all feel it too.)

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The hole in his memories screams warnings inside his head at the sight of the massive ship cruising toward their home. It shouts of danger and death, and the smell of blood and fear rises from the gaps.

"Shiro, you're the commanding officer here. What do you think we should do?"

He forces away the shadows of memories. The other four, kids, cadets, his soulmates, are looking to him, and their options are so, so few. Fight ( _don't_ , his mind screams, _you'll never stand a chance_ ), return to Earth and try to rally a defense (they won't listen. They didn't before), or flee forward into the unknown.

The stars flow past like a river of sand from their speed.

"...We decide together."

They plunge into the portal.

Shiro's arm burns for an instant, and when he pulls up his sleeve, black sand trickles down from the top of all three hourglasses. When he glances around, the others are checking their arms as well.

As they burst out the other side of the portal, he thinks of the old beliefs about heroes and villains and black timers, and wonders which they've just chosen to be.

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After he meets Matt, Shiro wonders about who his second soulmate might be. He imagines a thousand different combinations of age, gender, appearance, and heart.

An alien Princess, displaced ten thousand years across time and space from everything she once knew, is not one of them.

He feels, without looking, the moment his other red timer begins to flow, the tingling heat of the bond taking shape. But he fights the urge to look, to revel in the discovery, because she's torn with grief and they're standing on the edge of stepping forward into war and now is not the time, for a grieving Princess or a broken man. They have other problems, bigger ones, than explaining soulbonds to a species whose arms probably bare, and he is not a weight she needs to carry at this time.

"They set off two of my blues." Pidge tells him later as they float along a river. "Probably for the others, too."

Shiro covers his forearm with a metal hand. "Later. Focus on the Galra for now."

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Sendak's ship is a minefield of tattered memories and bone-deep fears. The name Champion cuts something deep in the core of him and he wonders about his black timers again, whether the ones on some of his soulmates' arms are his.

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The moment the Black Lion's mind touches his feels like less than an epiphany but more than a dream. It's like two pieces fitting together of something he never knew was split, like the moment a soulbond forms but spread throughout his entire soul.

Her golden gaze transfixes him for a long moment, and looking into them, he swears he sees the stars that captivated him for so long.

(The ones that brought him to the Galra. The ones that brought him here.)

(The stars that sparkled on his arm from the very day he was born.)

But there's no time to wonder why.

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They fly.

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They fight.

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They fail.

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This is how he dies, he thinks, as the tractor beam draws him upwards.

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It's not his own fear that draws him back, but that of his soulmates. He can feel it echoing through him, across soulbonds and Lion bonds and on his arm the sand is rushing down. He thinks of years of wondering, not knowing what he was, and having no one to ask, and the moment he met a three-year-old boy and became determined to be the guide he never had, and that same urge to protect takes over. He cannot be strong for himself but for them? Anything. Anything at all.

He never remembers the words that come out of his mouth. Only the desperate hope that it will grant his soulmates strength, that it will help them fight, win, _live_.

And then-

And _then_ -

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He-no, _they_ -are infinite. The stars stretch around them, as numerous as the grains of sand on all the beaches in the world. Dusted white racing across the void as their minds join, combine, and grow.

They feel whole in a way they never knew they weren't. This is more than the blue and red and white and black bonds that stretch among them in a web and away from them to the stars, far more than the simple threads that link their souls. This is where, and who, and what, they were always meant to be.

And the white sand, like the stardust, flows.


End file.
